For its first eight years, Amazon
$AMZN didn’t have a single profitable quarter.
Now the Seattle bookseller is worth over $1.2 trillion.
What is “regret minimization”, and how did it guide Jeff Bezos’s decades-long bet on the rise of the internet?
Time for a thread 🧵
In the late 1980s, Jeff Bezos was just one of the hundreds of computer whizzes who migrated to Wall Street.
In the coming years, he would see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and engineer a multi-decade bet on the internet.
What can we learn from Amazon’s early years?
Throughout his career, Bezos loved to dive into new opportunities.
He had a “regret minimization framework” - making decisions to eliminate regret at lost opportunities.
That’s why Bezos left his well-paying job at trading firm D. E. Shaw in 1993 to found Amazon.
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